Phasing is what was introduced in wrath, where as you complete quests you enter new phases so the world actually changes based on your actions and was a great way to improve story.
Sharding and layering are the same thing, layering is just larger shards. So while a shard is usually zone wide layers are continent wide.
Oh and there are typically more shards than there are layers so layers are harder to abuse.
From the sounds of it they are only going to have a few layers per realm, so one you have to get random people to invite you through trade chat, and even then there is no way to guarantee they are in a different layer and then you have to hope that node/rare is up on the new layer. It is very inconsistent and not really that succeptiple to abuse. Also if you are on a realm with multiple layers that means you are on a realm with twice as many people as it should have so there should be twice as many node/rare spawns. So even if it does work its not really abusing anything.
You also dont understand how that its not really abuse to farm multiple nodes either since you are on a realm which needs double population for 2nd farmable layer to appear so that realm should have twice as many spawns to keep supply and demand at the correct level.
Also it is no where near as consistent as people claim it is.
This was regularly lambasted by far more of the player base, causing them to move away from that idea to Layering.
The issue is that the abuse mechanisms you talk about apply to sharding too, so any use of it beyond the 1-10 zones would have exactly the same effects.
Yes, but the issues would be limited to non-contested pvp zones that have fewer high value nodes ect. Sharding 1-20 has less potential impact on the economy and less impact on pvp encounters and solves the bottleneck issue with technology that Blizzard has worked with.
Blizzard’s goal with layering is to provide many realms with 3k players in them, to simulate any given realm equivalent to launch, with minimal disappearances while you play. Its a worthy goal, when we expect a huge amount of drop off in the player base in the early days.
The problem they’re likely concerned with on Sharding only the 1-10 or even only 1-20, is that people can hit 20 within 1 day played easy, and so 20 may not be high enough before the population drops off again.
I totally think it will drop off after the hype dies down, but given what we’re seeing, people may get far further into the levelling process before they quit than I had originally predicted, and if Blizzard shares that concern, layering is there to hold them for that first week or two even if they get to 20-30 zones.
Adding protections to prevent the abuse of layer hopping, to me, seems like a far better solution to the problem than the usual “Throw it all out!” kneejerk reaction.
Each of them wreck any sort of community on a realm. I just hope that Blizzard will eventually remove layering once the population dies down after the first few months.
Both have their advantages. And your explanations are a little off. Basically:
Layering is how you described sharding. Once a certain population is reached, a new “layer” is created. Sharding OTOH works in both directions. It will split high populations, but also merge low populations. It basically takes the pool of players within a set of servers and balances them out to relatively equal populations across different “shards.” The key difference is that layering can only work in a single direction because it’s server-specific. Sharding works both ways because servers are combined into a group.
As for abuse, it’s easier to abuse sharding because the way it combines low populations allows easy jumping between instances. Layering is very difficult to abuse because of a simple key fact that if there aren’t enough people, there’s only one single instance of the zone.
As for what’s better: Layering keeps you with only people from your server and the idea is seamless gameplay within your layer, and it’s something that’s only “on” when the demand for it is there. But sharding addresses the reality that dead servers are going to exist.
Per Blizzard, layering will only last for Phase 1. So any problems or manipulation is limited. At best they will have a temporary gold and boe gear advantage. My guess is that Phase 1 will only last 1-3 months.
This doesn’t makes sense though given the way they explained layering is supposed to work.
Let me explain.
Layers are dynamic/flexible, as has been stated by the devs. Therefore you can’t always stay and be stickied to 1 particular layer.
The only way you’d end up on the same layer all the time is if the total active population of the server stays at the ~2.5k -3k mark (the maximum number of people in one layer they accept, aka one healthy vanilla world population).
(That’s also the target they aim for when they want to remove the layers, because the world is designed to work for that ~2.5k - 3k population)
At the point of reaching and staying at the max pop mark, there’d be no need for additional layers. Therefore, you stay in the only layer left.
If the population exceeds the ~3k mark, a new layer forms, and people will be shifted around accordingly.
Hence, the layers are then dynamically adjusting the worlds active pop to demand. And you can see that transition happening in game as everyone, mobs and players poof out as layers dynamically shuffle people into their respective layers.
So! The only way it would work the way you described, would be If they were static. Your character would be put in 1 layer it would always stay in, and you’d always see the exact same characters who are also assigned to it around everytime. But they aren’t static. Therefore that can’t happen.
If they were static, there’d be no reason to have them instead of regular servers, as they’d be just servers within a server. And they’d end up to have to do the whole merging of servers, splitting apart communities anyway because set in stone servers can’t adjust their populations on their own without manual interference.
They need them to be dynamic/automatic to allow for their proposed plan to work and for this whole thing to pay off.
Their whole point with layering is to have a system in place at launch and the first few months to manage server population issues (and big gameplay issues) while they let in way more than 1 normal servers population at launch.
They do this to keep their total open server count as low as they can, and (in theory, mind you) later on avoid having to split up realm communities because of population issues as the “tourists” supposedly will leave en masse.
But if they don’t die down as anticipated (likely), or somehow end up too low across the board (unlikely), we are met with some pretty big unanswered questions about what measures will be taken then.
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